I’ve been thinking a lot about why the adaptation of Heated Rivalry has left me uneasy, and I keep coming back to how fundamentally Ilya was reframed.
In the books, Ilya is not cold. He’s overwhelmed.
Season one removes much of the context that makes that clear.
We lost the deeper explanation of his mother’s death and, more importantly, the fact that his father explicitly conditioned him to stay silent.
We lost the emotional meaning of the necklace he wears because it belonged to his mother. We lost his repeated verbal declarations of love including saying “I love you” in Russian more than once.
We lost the moment where he asks Shane to travel away with him, one of the clearest displays of his desperation and vulnerability in the book
We also lost the small, intimate details that humanize him: calling Shane “sweetheart” talking about Shane’s freckles, talking about the wedding proposal, the softness that exists even when he doesn’t know how to articulate what he feels.
At the same time, the adaptation makes very deliberate additions and shifts elsewhere.
Shane is written as far more openly romantic and emotionally fearless from the beginning. He feels safer, more certain, less conflicted than he is at this stage in the books. Meanwhile, the show emphasizes Ilya being with multiple other people, reinforcing a perception of emotional distance or detachment.
What’s especially telling is what wasn’t shown: Shane’s own sexual exploration with two men, which in the book complicates his rigidity and highlights that he isn’t as emotionally or sexually resolved as he appears.
By cutting Ilya’s interiority while softening and stabilizing Shane, the story quietly shifts the emotional responsibility of the relationship almost entirely onto Ilya. The tension starts to read less like a clash between two people with incompatible fears, and more like a problem of Ilya’s communication, his openness, his supposed coldness.
This is why I’m nervous about season two (The Long Game).
That book is not about Ilya becoming warmer, clearer, or easier to love. It’s about him being seen without having to translate his pain into something more palatable. It’s about a relationship where growth is mutual and not corrective.
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